zBook G2 Owners - Alternatives to "Z Turbo Drive"?

I think this is the original HP Zturbo drive

http://www8.hp.com/us/en/mpc/oas/product-detail.html?oid=7633917

 

The product white paper that says the M.2 slot on the ZBook 17 G2 works with SATA or PCI-E drives is in error.

I spent numerous hours on the phone with HP ZBook support, including one of the senior engineers that is over all of the ZBook support, going over testing out my ZBook 17 G2 with a HP-provided Z Turbo drive, which worked in my system without issue. The Crucial MX200 M.2 SATA drive would not work and I almost had to eat an Amazon third-party vendor restocking fee since I sent back a drive that wasn't defective and just not compatible.

The ZBook 17 G2's M.2 slot is PCI-E only and obviously only supports a 2260 drive. The only drive that works in this situation to date is the Sandisk A110 / HP Z Turbo drive.

Until we get another vendor to make a 2260-sized PCI-E SSD, there isn't another drive to test with.

 

Did they say anything about the 14 G2?

I'm very curious whether the 14 G2 does support M.2 SATA SSDs or not, because of this post:

 

Hi!
Currently I'm working on project to turn k3100m/k4100M into k5100m/GTX 880m without hardware mod and I'll be very appreciative if you help with some stuff I'm looking for people with gtx 780/880 or quadro K3/4/5100M. All you need to do:

1. Download GPU-Z and save the vBIOS.
2. Download RWEverything, in top corner select "Access-->PCI". Then windows should appear - select device called "nVidia Corporation VGA Controller". After, save the info to binary with Shift+F2 combination.
3. Share this two files with me

Best Regards,
Valentine.

 

I don't think any of the Zbook G2s m.2 slots will work with Sata drives. Other than capacity what is the use of using the slot for sata drives anyway?

 

Capacity, price and availability

It looks like this user has a Crucial MX200 M.2 2260 SATA SSD running in his ZBook 14 G2, but i'm not 100% sure:

 

Hello together,

as I told some threads before, I bought the SSD "MZHPV256HDGL-00000". But as soon as I install it into the ZBook 15 G2 and boot, it stops during boot and powers of. After this it boots directly again without any problem, but it does not show the SSD in running operating system (BIOS seems to exclude the adapter).

I thought maybe the SSD is defect, so I bought an adapter for pcie: http://www.delock.de/produkte/G_89370/merkmale.html
With this it works fine in a normal PC.

Are there any BIOS options I have to set?

Thanks in advance,
Matthias

 

Dear All,

Any news on that one?
http://www.liteonssd.com/index.php?Itemid=264&option=com_zoo&view=item&category_id=110&item_id=2501

It is a 2260 512GB PCIe SSD that supports PCIe Gen 2x4. I think this will fit all the Zbook G2 models and will eventually replace the 256GB Sandisk A110. Can anyone please confirm this? And how is Lite-on compared to Sandisk

 

Hey Mohamed,

good find - seems to be a HP original

http://www.ebay.de/itm/Lite-On-M-2-...575230?hash=item235e289cbe:g:p-cAAOSwxN5WX7Fn

 

Hell,
i bought the "MZHPV128HDGM-00000", which should be AHCI, not NVMe.

Got the same problem as Hopey described.

Your help would be appreciated.

Thanks
Charly

 

I think I will order one but I need to make sure it is compatible with the Zbook G2. The Sandisk A110 can only be found as used or new bare drive near this price. So its a good deal to get the 512 GB 2260 version. Hope it works

 

Hello Charly,

did you have a look at the disk connection mode? is it ide/ ahci or raid?

I got the idea today - no time to test yet... maybe it is in ide mode and that's not working with the ahci ssd.

 

Hey hopey,

did it test yesterday. There is only AHCI available, so nothing to choose.

In BIOS at the system information the zbook recognized the M.2 SSD, but i wasn't able to install an OS from a USB pen drive (maybe some issues with my pen drive).

Have to try it again later.

Does anybody have experience with the option "UEFI Native (without CSM)"?

 

OK, I got full success now. The problems I had and I wrote were related to UEFI.

I got 2280 SAMSUNG MZHPU256HCGL and it works fine now.

They key point is that due to some bug in BIOS it works only with UEFI boot. Also initial screen for some reason is invisible.

Once I used only GPT and used both Linux and Windows only in UEFI mode things work fine.
I boot my primary OS (Linux) directly and boot the other one after
I press F9 right after power on - and boot then: UEFI file and point location to UEFI boot file:
\EFI\boot\bootx64.efi on the Windows disk.

To be sure I suggest UEFI native mode - since this will ensure Windows are in UEFI mode (in my case they were in BIOS mode booted in UEFI hybrid).

 

I thought 2260 pcie was the longest the G2 could accommodate? Don't see much advantage in the LiteOn mentioned in read/write unless a person is trying to fill all the ports with storage. I keep waiting for Samsung to introduce a 2260 size one t en I will be in the market.

 

2280 fits as well, the problem is that there is no mounting hole so I used duck tape instead.

IMHO this was very strange decision by HP - enough space for 2280 but no mounting hole.

I have very mixed feelings about this notebook - on one side I could play Witcher 3 on lowest settings, on the other this 2280 thing, BIOS bugs, slower disk performance than expected, also heard about batch of poor-quality LCD panels, luckily HP had honored the warranty. I had Elitebook 8560 previously and the only problem I had with it was no highlighted keyboard.

 

I've bought the Samsung 2280 MZHPV256HDGL-00000 AHCI version for the Zbook 17G2. It fits, but it still is a tight fight and there is almost no space between some elements on the motherboard. But without physical modification it fits. There is no mounting hole available or even neccessary because it is locked due to the chassis (it just fits underneath of the chassis and keeps it in place) on the end of the Samsung SSD drive. You'll need to push a little bit of the cushion/foam away on the left side for 3 mm or so.

But the settings in which we've managed to get Windows up and running on this drive is:

1. Update the BIOS first (we've updated till version 1.12)
2. Put the UEFI mode in the BIOS in hybrid mode. Secureboot can be enabled if you whish.
3. Place the USB device on top of the boot order in the BIOS
4. Adjust other settings accordingly your own preferences (like VTd etc.)
5. Use a USB stick to install
6. Boot from the USB drive, it just takes a couple of seconds extra in the HP logo screen so please be aware of that.
7. Install Windows
8. Enjoy.

Only thing that needs some attention is that the BIOS seems be taking some seconds before it actually boots from the M2 device. Trying to figure out to eliminate this one. Suggestions appreciated!

 

Hope they get a 2260 model out soon, a 2280 just will not fit in my HP ZBook 14G2. There just isn't enough space

 

What kind of speed do you get? Does it use 4x or 2x lanes?

 

Sorry for my late reply. I will test it tommorow since this notebook is from a collegue of mine! But I think it uses 2 lanes (despite the fact that my collegue told me that it was blazingly fast; referencing towards an Samsung 840 EVO).....

 

Hi all, do you think that the Samsung 950 pro nvme 2280 SSD would work in the HP Zbook G2? I want to use it as a boot drive for Windows 8.1 / Windows 10. I hear tales of people being able to fit 2280 SSDs in the 2260 slot. If nobody has tried, I could try and do some testing. I am also using a Thunderbolt eGPU simultaneously, so I really hope that this PCIe SSD does not interfere with the PCIe lanes assigned to the Thunderbolt chip.

 

Hi all,

I've tested the speeds of the Samsung drive in the m2 slot and I got read/write speeds between 730 MB/s and 620MB/s. I assume therefor it uses two lanes.

Another small update: you still need to make a physical adjustment. The 2280 just won't fit without slicing a bit of the plastic from the chassis on the left side away for 3/4 mm. That's the only way to make the module fit in its slot (without a small angle which gives booting errors and some kind of light whistling noise which seems a timing / clock problem). If it fits straight, you don't have those problems.

 

This thread is amazing. But still no answer if the ZBook 15 G2 m.2 slot can work with NVMe cards like the "Samsung 950 PRO M.2 512GB PCIe 3.0x4 SSD"...
Even at reduced speed of 730MB/s. Will it simply work or not?

 

Search and read the white papers of HP for zBook_G2: YES, NVME for m.2 is supported by the zBook_G2, altough I didn't try it. Never the less you'll have problems with getting drivers! For example when you would like to boot from a USB-stick, the stick-OS have to have the NVMe-driver! In m.2-AHCI-Mode you'll don't need a driver.
So for me: At the moment useless and not recommandable to take a NVME! Samsung does not have drivers, because the VNMe-cards are only for OEMs sold. You'll only can tke the generic Windows-NVMe-driver for all NVMe-cards. And if that's an driver which is enough...???
You'll have only problems with drivers - and as you write correctly: Only about read ~700MB/sek. is supported.
http://www.controlling21.de/firma/artikel/schnelle-ssd.htm
https://www.ramcity.com.au/blog/how-to-install-windows-8.1-on-the-samsung-xp941-ss/138296
SM951-AHCI works at zBook15_G2 - but only with max. ~700MB/sek because of zBook-Interface:
http://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/products/flash-storage/client-ssd/
m.2-Interface of zBook_G2 is 2 lanes (NOT 4x) of PCIe_2.0 but works also with PCIe_3.0-cards.

PS: All my infos are from Oct.2015.
Sorry, but at the moment I don't have more time to help you....

 

Thank you Xaos for your detailed and prompt reply.

I will be getting an HP Z Turbo G2 (HP Prod-ID #M1F74AA [Part #814803-001]) in a few weeks {for free (can't choose)}. I plan to pull the Samsung m.2 board out and stick it in my ZBook 15 G2. Once I do that , I'll share the results.

Urr

 

Hey Urr, any good news with this approach? did the m.2 board simply pop out? was it the corrct (2260) size?

 

Hi there,

I would like to share my achievements with the Samsung SP951 NVMe drive in my Zbook 15 G2 mobile workstation.

Week ago I got the above mentioned M.2 drive and was able to successfully install Windows 10 on it, but it ended up with the famous “File \Windows\System32\winload.efi is either corrupted or missing” error while doing its first reboot. I have tried every possible HW setup and BIOS option combination. No luck even when I left just the NVMe drive installed.

I spent the whole last weekend with tests and gathering know how regarding NVMe and UEFI. On Sunday evening I was finally able to manually boot Windows 10 from partition which resides on the NVMe ssd.

The thing is “help” UEFI to see the NVMe ssd and its partition and file system structure, this is possible by loading an UEFI NVMe driver module.

Unfortunately, there is no NVMe driver module included in the UEFI BIOS provided by HP and I haven’t even been able to find any modded HP BIOS. As I have zero knowledge to mod it myself, the only option left was to load the EFI NVMe driver manually.

That’s how I spend couple hours learning UEFI Shell and how to boot in to it. From the EFI Development Kit II it is possible to download compiled version of UEFI shell. https://edk2.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/edk2/trunk/edk2/EdkShellBinPkg/FullShell/X64/Shell_Full.efi

Then it took me another few hours finding the compiled NVMe driver, because I have no experiences with compiling. In the following thread of the insanelymac forum there is post from a member named “bs0d” http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/284656-clover-general-discussion/page-278 which includes attached zip archive http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?app=core&module=attach&section=attach&attach_id=148037 with compiled UEFI driver.

Note: you need to be registered member of the forum to be able to download the file.

Having these two files (Shell_Full.efi and NVMexpressdxe.efi) on the SATA SSD EFI system partition is enough to be able to boot manually by choosing the “Boot from EFI” boot option and navigating to the Shell_Full.efi file through the folder structure and selecting it.
After the system boots in UEFI shell, issuing of following two commands will load the NVMe driver and Windows boot manager:

Code:

Load fs0:\EFI\Shell\nvmexpressdxe.efi
fs0:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\Bootmgfw.efi

And last but not least, I spend some hours on searching how to load the system residing on the NVMe drive fully automatically. First I thought about rEFIt, grub and other bootloaders, but finally I have leveraged the UEFI shell startup script and together with the customized boot option in the HP bios I am able to boot windows 10 automatically.

Below is the content of the startup.nsh file which needs to be in the same folder as the Shell_Full.efi file.

Code:

@echo -off
;mode 80 25
;FOUNDNVMEDRIVERMODULE section is simply to locate the correct drive
cls
if exist fs0:\EFI\Shell\NvmExpressDxe.efi then
fs0:
echo Found NVMe driver module on fs0:
goto FOUNDNVMEDRIVERMODULE
endif
if exist fs1:\EFI\Shell\NvmExpressDxe.efi then
fs1:
echo Found NVMe driver module on fs1:
goto FOUNDNVMEDRIVERMODULE
endif
if exist fs2:\EFI\Shell\NvmExpressDxe.efi then
fs2:
echo Found NVMe driver module on fs2:
goto FOUNDNVMEDRIVERMODULE
endif
echo "Unable to find NVMe driver module".
echo "Please mount the drive with the NVMe driver module".
echo ""
goto END
:FOUNDNVMEDRIVERMODULE
echo =============================================================
echo ""
echo "load the NVMe driver and map the NVMe HDD now?"
;pause
echo "loading the NVMe driver module"
load \EFI\Shell\NvmExpressDxe.efi
echo ""
echo ""
;echo "load the Windows boot loader on NVMe HDD?"
;pause
echo "loading the Windows boot loader on NVMe HDD"
\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi
:END

I used an elevated command prompt to assign a letter to the SATA SSD EFI system partition (diskpart) and copy the 3 files into for that purpose created “\EFI\Shell\” folder.

In BIOS you need to enable the customized boot option and set its value to “\EFi\Shell\Shell_Full.efi” (without quotes) and then move the customized boot option up in the UEFI Boot order list of BIOS boot options section in the Advanced menu.

EDIT: If you want to load a windows boot manager from the EFI partition on NVMe drive follow the post Urr posted few posts further. The key changes in the startup.nsh are setting the version compatibility at the beginning of the script, updating the mappings with "map -u" command before loading the bootmgfw.efi from the right path.

 

Hi have good and bad news. The Samsung NVMe (MZVPV512) SSD is a 2280 form factor with chips on both sides. Physically it fits into my ZBook15G2. A bit tight, but ok. Its working well with the samsung NVMe driver (windows 7). I also added this driver to my WinPE Recovery USB drive, so the NVMe SSD is accessible in recovery mode. The problem is booting from it. As said in the excellent post from Lubomir above, the HP provided BIOS does NOT recognize the NVMe SSD during boot.

 

Hi Lubomir,

Thank you for the creative solution you posted above!
Let me see if I got it right...
You load the nvme driver from your SATA SSD EFI partition right? (fs0:\EFI\Shell\nvmexpressdxe.efi), so why at the end you also boot from it? (fs0:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\Bootmgfw.efi)
I ask because I don't know much about UEFI.
I would like to use your solution, but do not understand if the \EFI\Microsoft\Boot\Bootmgfw.efi reside on your SATA SSD or on your NVMe SSD.

Thnks,
Urr

 

Hello Lubomir.

After loading the nvme driver (fs0:\EFI\Shell\nvmexpressdxe.efi), you need to remap drivers to file systems: (map -r).
After this, your NVMe based file system will apear in the list. For me, the file system name is always hd31c.
So after the re-map, I run (hd31c:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\Bootmgfw.efi) and walla! the new NVMe SSD boots perfectly!

Rgrds,
Urr

 

You may need to call (stall) command between driver loading and (map -r) to allow the driver time to load before the reamp

 

Hi Urr,
I wanted to use the aliases too, in my case it is hd32c. It works when I use this alias manually, but it doesn't work in the startup.nsh script.
The script is always interrupted with "cannot read from file - media changed". I suppose this happens after running the command "map -r".
So loading the windows boot manager from the SATA drive without remaping was the only solution for me.

regards

L.

 

1. For those who hesitate: ZBook 14 G2 definitely supports m.2 sata drives! I've installed adata sp600 2242 myself. Boot options & recovery OK, but You need to remove 2.5 drive to recover m.2 to m.2 - if not, systems recovers to 2.5 sata, even loading from m.2.

2. Can somebody teel which drive exactly is in ZBook 15 g2(z-turbo 512mb)?? Is it 2260?

3. I'll receive my 15u in 2weeks - it comes with 256 z turbo. & i have my previous Zturbo from 14g2.
Is there any possibility to install 2xpcie drives to 15u ZBook? I do not need 3g/4g communication & SD reader - is it possible to use these ports somehow? )

 

Hi L.,
You need to call map -u to update the map and not map -r. map -r resets all mapping, so it breaks the script.
This is my Startup.nsh. It works flawlessly for me:

Code:

@echo -off
set -v efishellmode 1.1.2
set StartupDelay 1
mode 120 36
;FOUNDNVMEDRIVERMODULE section is simply to locate the correct drive
cls
if exist fs0:\EFI\Shell\NvmExpressDxe.efi then
fs0:
echo Found NVMe driver module on fs0:
goto FOUNDNVMEDRIVERMODULE
endif
if exist fs1:\EFI\Shell\NvmExpressDxe.efi then
fs1:
echo Found NVMe driver module on fs1:
goto FOUNDNVMEDRIVERMODULE
endif
if exist fs2:\EFI\Shell\NvmExpressDxe.efi then
fs2:
echo Found NVMe driver module on fs2:
goto FOUNDNVMEDRIVERMODULE
endif
echo "Unable to find NVMe driver module".
echo "Please mount the drive with the NVMe driver module".
echo ""
goto END
:FOUNDNVMEDRIVERMODULE
echo =============================================================
echo ""
echo "load the NVMe driver and map the NVMe HDD now?"
echo "loading the NVMe driver module"
load \EFI\Shell\NvmExpressDxe.efi
map -u
echo "Find the NVMe HDD"
if exist fs0:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi then
fs0:
endif
if exist fs1:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi then
fs1:
endif
if exist fs2:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi then
fs2:
endif
if exist fs3:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi then
fs3:
endif
if exist fs4:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi then
fs4:
endif
echo "load the Windows boot loader on NVMe HDD"
\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi
:END

Urr

 

I have ZBook 15 G2. it is built to host 2260. But I managed to place a 2280 (512GB) in there . Its not ideal -a bit tight, but works fine.

I wanted to order the z-turbo, but they said it is no longer available from HP. the HP z-turbo G2 (Part #: M1F74AA) has a 2280 inside (NVMe!). This is what I used. I took the samsung m.2 card out of the z-turbo G2 and placed it in the laptop. It works very nicely for me. But booting from this NVMe device required quite a bit of a hassle to setup. The reason isthat the ZBook BIOS does not include an NVMe driver. See prev. post from Lubomir.

I will post my steps to make it work soon.

Urr

 

Up till now I could not find a way to use more than x2 lanes. I also don't need the SD reader and 3g/4g comm. but the allocation is fixed by BIOS and there is no apparent way to override it.

Urr

 

Here is the installation procedure I followed for installing the Samsung NVMe SAMSUNG MZVPV512, which is inside the HP Z Turbo G2 (Part #: M17F74AA) in a ZBook 15 G2:

- Take the old HDD out of the laptop
- Place the m.2 PCIe NVMe SSD in place
- Boot from Windows Install (8.1 and up for NVMe driver), install windows.
- Let the first stage of install perform but instead of doing a restart from the new drive, shut the system down.
o Place the old HDD back
o Note: You can delete everything in the Primary partition of the old HDD later - no need to rush.
o Have another USB Thumb drive (Win-PE 5.1 and up {recovery USB thumb drive})
o On this USB Thumb drive, prepare the following:
§ Create a folder \EFI\Shell and place there the following:
· NvmExpressDxe.efi – NVMe Driver in EFI format (take the link to it from Lubomir post)
· Shell_Full.efi – a shell to run EFI commands (take the link to it from Lubomir post)
· startup.nsh startup script (See my post with the script)
§ Create a folder \GDISK
§ Get GDisk from Sourceforge.net and extract it to \GDISK
o Boot from this USB Thumb drive
o Run diskpart and discover the old HDD disk number and the new SSD disk numbers and prepare them to become GPT drives. For example, if HDD disk number is 1 and SDD disk number is 2:
§ Make room in the disks for the EFI partition:
· Diskpart
· select disk 1
· list partition
· select the largest partition. For example: select partition 2
· shrink it by 100MB: shrink desired=100 minimum=100
· select disk 2
· list partition
· select the largest partition. For example: s elect partition 2
· shrink it by 100MB: shrink desired=100 minimum=100
§ Create EFI Partition
· Select disk 1
· Create partition EFI
· Format fs=FAT32 quick
· Assign letter=y:
· Select disk 2
· Create partition EFI
· Format fs=FAT32 quick
· Assign letter=z:
· exit
o Transform both disks to GPT with gdisk. Suppose the disk numbers for the HDD is 1 and SDD disk number is 2 then do as follows:
§ \GDISk\gdisk64 1:
§ w
§ Confirm and exit
§ \GDISK\gdisk64 2:
§ w
§ Confirm and exit
§ Check the drives are GPT with this: \GDISK\gdisk64 –l 1:
§ See that drive is now GPT
§ Use diskpart to assign a drive letter to the new partition
o Set the hook for custom boot with EFI shell
§ Create \EFI\Shell directory in HDD EFI partition:
· md y:\EFI
· md y:\EFI\Shell
§ copy NVMe driver, EFI Shell and startup script to y:\EFI\Shell: copy d:\EFI\Shell\*.* y:\EFI\Shell\
o Initialize Microsoft windows boot loader. Suppose the new SDD primary partition drive letter is C:. and its EFI partition drive letter is z:, then
§ Bcdboot C:\Windows /s z: /f UEFI
o Take out the USB Thumb drive and boot into BIOS
o Set boot mode to Hybrid (UEFI + CSM - compatibility mode)
o Set a custom boot: add the following path to it: \EFI\Shell\Shell_Full.efi
o Place custom boot highest in the UEFI boot order list
o Reboot

Urr

 

Thanks, But HP offer Z turbo drive 512gb (15g2 - P3D87UT for example) - I don't think they use 2280 in a 2260 slot... Just interested which SSD is it. Sandisk has no 512gb pci-e drive, as I see.
Hope they should reconfigure something in furhter BIOS versions, otherwise HP is not credible company for me. To use fast & expensive drives in a machine that could not handle it... in 2015/2016....

 

I have been in touch with the HP quys via my personal channel and asked them if there is a chance to get the BIOS updated with NVMe driver and posibility to boot from it.
The answer was something like:
ZBook 15 G2 only supports HP TurboDrive G1 (M.2 2260 PCIe x2) and there is no plan to extend the qualified components to support NVMe drives on G2. However the actual G3 generation already supports NVMe and is able to boot from it.

And I can confirm that, as yesterday I was able to find the NVMe dxe drivers in the extracted Zbook 15 G3 BIOS file.

 

Hi Urr,
Not sure if I got right your steps, but it looks to me that you could have saved all the hassle with MBR to GPT transformation by having the BIOS set to pure UEFI before installing the Windows on the NVMe drive.
OK, by reading it second time..., maybe not save all the hassle, but at least you wouldn't need to do the conversion on the new NVMe drive.
And you probably don't need to switch it back from pure UEFI to the CSM anymore, if you want to remove the old windows partition and need just boot the system installed on the NVMe drive. Well actually you could theoretically boot the old system too, you just need to update the bootmgr on the NVME drive by adding another OS loader with the right path to its winload.efi

regards

L.

PS: How come that the system on HDD isn't already GPT?

 

GREAT!
it looks promising, I am going to test it right now.
It means I have to still learn a lot, in particular search and read How I could have missed that one

EDIT: It really works, and it is probably all I need.

I could have saved last sunday doing something else knowing this
But one learns something also from driving a dead end road. I understand now how to extract and alter the BIOS to include the necessary UEFI drivers to boot from UEFI. The only thing which need to be solved is how to bypass the BIOS security check which halts the boot if the BIOS RSA signature doesn't match.
The keywords are INSYDE; Donovan; CodeRush

thanks

L.

 

Yes, you are right.
I followed this procedure before understanding that the Zbook15 BIOS simply can't read the NVMe drive- I was thinking transforming it from MBR to GPT might help. On this journey, we learn things we never intended to learn. In this case, it was how to transform an MBR disk to a boot-able GPT disk without loosing the data on it.

-Urr

 

I did some digging into it and found that there are only two lanes wired between the m.2 slot and the motherboard chip-set (QM87) "PCI Express Interface" module. So BIOS hacking will not help. I am afraid we are stuck with the x2 lanes limitation.

The Gore details:
The m.2 slot has two lanes attached to QM87. One lane is attached to PCIe Port 5 and the other to PCIe Port 6. There is an entity, I think it is the SD Card Reader that has four lanes attached to PCIe Ports 1-4. There is another lane going from a Pericom PCI Switch and is attached to PCIe Port 7. To this switch, the Intel Wireless network controller and the Realtek Audio Controller are attached. They share the bandwidth of one lane.

• QM87 PCIe Ports 1-4 are configured to use Port 1 as x4 lanes (Ports 2-4 interface disabled).
• QM87 PCIe Ports 5-8i are configured as follows:
  • Port 5 is x2 (Port 6 interface disabled)
  • Port 7 is x1 (Port 8 not used)

I wish there was a way to switch between the SD-Card reader lanes and the m.2 slot lanes :-(
But as far as I understand, its physical.

-Urr

 

I would like to share my observations about NVMe. The performance is simply staggering! there is a huge difference in performance in random access tests between the NVMe version on the m.2 SSD and the xHCI version of it. UP to THREE TIMES FASTER!. It was well worth the effort. You can read here why it here.
My Zbook15G2 has turned incredibly responsive. very fast boot, very fast heavy applications startup and things work very well in parallel to each other. In the above white paper, there is a nice explanation on the difference between xHACI and NVMe operation. I installed the Samsung driver and performance boosted even more. NVMe is the way to go. definitely!

The above benchmarks are even better with the 512GB SSD due to higher parallelism.

Urr

 

I just plugged in 951 nvme into my zbook 17 g2. am doing about 780read, 730 write.. currently using as my backup drive. I run davinci resolve off my 3x 2Tb 950evo raid0 drives. which still is faster than 951 nvme in the zbook 17 g2. so far the raid0 is doing 1.6Gb read, 1.45Gb write according to atto. I had to score the magnesium case slowly and chip off about 3mm of metal covering a chipset. so far so good. no screws but the other side of the 2280 is held in place by the casing. I slapped on a 3m double tape just in case.

 

Can't see the pic... What perfomance is it? seq read/write?

 

The big improvement NVMe brings is not in sequential Read / Write. It is in random access and parallel accesses to the disk.
A link to the benchmark is here.
Here are some important differences between AHCI and NVMe standards.
+------------------------------------------------------------------+
Access Latency:
AHCI - 6 us
NVMe - 2.8 us
+------------------------------------------------------------------+

+------------------------------------------------------------------+
Maximum queue & queue depth:
AHCI - 1 command queue. 32 commands per queue
NVMe - 64K queues. 64K commands per queue
+------------------------------------------------------------------+

+------------------------------------------------------------------+
Uncacheable register access
(each consumes 2K cycles):
AHCI - 6 per non-queued command. 9 per queued command
NVMe - 2 per command
+------------------------------------------------------------------+

+------------------------------------------------------------------+
MSI-X and interrupt steering:
AHCI - Single Interrupt
NVMe - 2K MSI-X Interrupts
+------------------------------------------------------------------+

+------------------------------------------------------------------+
Parallelism and multi-thread support:
AHCI - Requires synchronization lock to issue command
NVMe - No locking, doorbell register per queue
+------------------------------------------------------------------+

+------------------------------------------------------------------+
4 KB command efficiency
(4 KB critical in client PCs):
AHCI - Two serialized host DRAM fetches required
NVMe - One 64 B fetch
+------------------------------------------------------------------+

I Don't know about you, but for me, the responsiveness of my notebook is more important for me than saving a few seconds here and there when I copy big files around. And with NVMe, as the benchmark show, the responsiveness improves a lot! The thing is, with modern notebooks which use multiple cores, and with operating systems that know how to use those cores in parallel, NVMe shines.

Look at my benchmarks here. You can see that the performance increase of sequential ops relative to my SATA SDDis nice but not incredible.
On the other hand, the more sophisticated tests that include random access show a much more significant performance difference.

-Urr

 

for me sequential is more important. I do about 30-90Tb writes per month. using the video to do 4k video editing. the cache per project is around 4Tb. and I clear my cache about once every 2 days. connected to a 96Tb NAS via thunderbolt. so yeah. seq read and write is much more important.

 

I got a new:

HP ZBook 17 G2, Core i7-4810MQ, 16GB RAM, 750GB HDD, 256GB SSD, Quadro K4100M (J8Z41EA#ABD)

Did i unterstand it right there is no alternative drive for my 256gb Sandisk SSD?
Only a 512gb Z-Turbo-Drive ?

Thanks!

 

It depends on what exactly you mean with alternative drive.

You can have probably up to 3 disks in your notebook as I can have in the Zbook 15.
First in the position where usually one and only 2.5" SATA drives are installed, it can be either HHD or SSD.
Second in the upgrade bay, HP sells it with HDD, but you can swap it through SSD too.
Third option is to put the M.2 SSD in to the M.2 slot.